Just letting a stream of thoughts fly here.
What if real estate offices leveraged their prime – centre of the neighbourhood – offices, by turning them into startup hubs and really respond to the gig economy?
A while back I was pondering over the two great problems that real estate agencies have:
- Maintaining a constant source of great leads
- The overhead of having to have a physical High St office like all of the other brands.
In today’s economy everything is moving to an ‘as a service model’. People are renting everything to avoid the initial costs of starting a business.
A number of startup hubs are forming in core cities around the world and their features of very similar to the needs a real estate office.
If you think about a high performing real estate office the staff should never be there – they should be out selling. They only group or regroup to align and share the current listings or to attend a training session or to run a large – normally after hours – auction. With their schedule of open homes and visiting clients the office could be left free for startups to use as Co-working spaces.
These freelancers and startups could be a constant source of residential leads that have brand awareness. Or as they scale enough to require their own space, expand the rent roll of a commercial Property Management arm.
To increase brand equity and surprise and delight those using their the coworking space the real estate company could bring in presenters. They could present and train them on sales and marketing – and the agency could leverage the presenters to teach their own sales team.
Expanding their services beyond just property they could branch into:
- opening a cafe
- a print house
- a digital agency
- event management
- and all of the other ‘as a service’ offerings that a startup would consume.
Each time extending the rent roll of that commercial real estate agency.
Ultimately the real estate brand and it’s agents will become the hub and source of all of its thriving and a community.
And isn’t that exactly what they all want? Inbound leads arriving daily!
Here’s hoping a brand takes this up.
I would love to support them with the logistics and bookings and connecting with the startup community through marketing.
Nick Allen - Marketing, Growth & Running 
It would be interesting, Nick. Something is going to have to give. The forces of renting, consuming what we need in a just-in-time manner and working from anywhere are going to present tough challenges to the traditional real estate industry.
Yes Dan. I’ve seen a number of global startup hubs forming around the world building infrastructure and the personal networks/community between startups.
I also saw a great quote about the battle of startups vs big corporate. Startups race for distribution, corporates race to innovate.
This seemed like a good chance for a large corporate/franchise to leverage their distribution and rapidly develop a competitive advantage.
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Hello Nick,
You are sharing very nice information. And i also like to support these Real Estate agencies and Startup hubs. This will really help in Real Estate sector to grow up.
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